OMHS Students Attend The Write Connection

This year the Write Connection was held at Valleydale Church on March 7, 2019. The Write Connection is a program where young writers can listen to published authors talk about their experiences in writing and publishing. While we were there, we heard from Don Keith, author of Firing Point. Don Keith told us what he considered to be a perfect story, “When Otherwise ordinary people are placed in unusual situation and do remarkable things.” Keith also said that as a writer his goal has always been to elicit an emotional reaction from his readers. With these ideas in mind, he told us the most important step of writing a story, to write it. He cited many occasions where his friends and acquaintances had approached him with book ideas they had been working on for years. He told us that if we spend that long trying to perfect our stories, we will never write them. He advised us to write our stories, and get them out into the world.

We also heard from a fantasy writer, Ashley Chappell, author of the Dreams of Chaos series. She encouraged us as writers, to read more. She said “read everything you can get your hands on.“ Reading helps you gain perspective about the world around you, and she implored us to enrich our minds with outside ideas. She also talked about how fictional writing can be just as profitable as nonfiction. She described reading fiction as a simulation of situations we would never be able to experience in real life.

In our last section we were asked to write a story. Along the walls were drawings and paintings that we were asked to analyse, they ranged from pictures of people to still life to abstracts. After looking at these pictures, we were asked to select one of them. We were to write a story based off of our selected painting, in twenty minutes. At the end of this time, we gathered in groups with the people who chose the same painting. In our groups we read aloud our stories. It was interesting to see how the same picture sparked so many unique stories.